So, Konsole shipped by default with KDE Plasma, my current Desktop Environment. While I don’t have a problem with it, I am interested in what other people are using, because there very likely is something better out there.
Specifically I’ve seen talk of Kitty and Alacritty, although I’ve also read that the dev of Kitty is allegedly kind of a jerk, so I am specifically interested in how Konsole matches up to Alacritty in your experience, but other suggestions and general terminal emulator discussion are also welcome!
I don’t get the fixation people have with terminals. I don’t think I’ve ever used one in Linux that made me think “you know, I need to install a better terminal emulator”. So I just use what comes with my DE.
My counterpoint is terminator. The logger plugin saved my ass a few times, it remembers the commands I ran and what their output was so I don’t have to.
I guess it depends on if you’re willing to take advantage of the extra features, or just want to do as little CLI as possible
Nowadays I don’t use the CLI much. But back in the day I used vim professionally and still didn’t care. Maybe because I ran everything from within vim?
I am on EndeavourOS and install packages via the command line and on top of that I primarily use Neovim, so I spend a decent amount of time in the terminal
I get that, but even when I worked as a coder using vim I didn’t care. What makes, let’s say, Gnome terminal a bad terminal?
Providing it has tabs, I’ll use it.
Alacritty is really nice and easy to configure, and isn’t “tied” to any desktop environment, like Konsole is. Kitty is really cool for its implementation of image display. Foot is a Wayland-native alternative that is also really nice to use.
+1 for kitty. Embedded images for Ranger is super cool. The only downside is i’ve been getting rendering issues for a couple seconds after waking up from suspend but that’s probably a configuration issue on my end
Call me boring, but I really like the Gnome terminal.
There was one terminal that blew my mind in terms of speed and features, and it was Kitty: it’s properly fast and it’s packed with fantastic features, such as the ability to display images and play videos in the terminal itself.
However, I uninstalled it because it did one thing that really, REALLY rubbed me the wrong way: by default, it phones home to find updates.
Any software that phones home behind my back, even with good intentions, and particularly something as essential as a terminal in which you type all sorts of passwords, gets a hard pass from me. But if you don’t mind, I highly recommend it.
by default, it phones home to find updates.
Do you have a source for that? I just did a rough check using nethogs (on my Arch box) and I didn’t see any connections originating from kitty.
I also found this comment from the author mentioning that he wasn’t a fan of automatic updates (which implied it wasn’t a feature).
and no I dont want to do automatic updates, am not a fan of those. If and when you have an issue or want to try new functionality, its just a simple command to update it.
Do you have a source for that?
Yeah, my own eyes: it told me an update was available. That alarmed me enough to look around, and I found a toggle in the config file to disable automatic update checking. It was on by default.
Then I promptly uninstalled it. Too bad, because I really liked it.
EDIT: maybe I wasn’t clear: it doesn’t auto-update, it checks for updates. Slight difference. What bothers me with that is that it does networking operations when a terminal has no business doing any networking at all.
Hmm, sounds like you used a binary build that wasn’t packaged by your distro, which explains why I didn’t see any network traffic from my Kitty which I installed from the Arch repos. The config docs mentions this:
update_check_intervalThe interval to periodically check if an update to kitty is available (in hours). If an update is found, a system notification is displayed informing you of the available update. The default is to check every 24 hours, set to zero to disable. Update checking is only done by the official binary builds. Distro packages or source builds do not do update checking.
Ah right. Well it’s possible, I don’t really remember. That was quite some time ago.
I switched from Alacritty to Wezterm because I wanted ligature support and it’s also written in Rust. I really like it, though it had some issues with Wayland so I had to install a -git package but it’s fixed now. It also has a bunch of features I don’t use so I can’t really talk about those. I you don’t care about ligatures and the features, use Alacritty, it’s really good.
Wez is actually pretty awesome too
I like wezterm a lot but lately have not been impressed with some breaking changes on the main branch. I know its basically a nightly release, but that’s the recommended way to install according to their website. The devs acknowledged it, and recommended using a tiling manager as the fix.
Kitty, hands down. GPU accelerated; native image protocol implemented by
ranger,neofetch, and more; incredibly customizable; multiplexing with multiple windows and tabs; ligature support; and much moreIf anybody has any questions about it, swing on over to Kitty Terminal Emulator [!kittyterimal@midwest.social]
I have to ssh in to arbitrary systems often and Kitty seemed to have compatibility issues, which I still don’t grok but plainly can’t use
kitty requires its
terminfobe set properly on the remote host. Its best to use the ssh kitten (I have it aliased), though it’s only technically required the first time on any particular box/instance. See this issue in the FAQ: I get errors about the terminal being unknown or opening the terminal failing or functional keys like arrow keys don’t work?I guess my issue is that these are production machines that aren’t really meant to be mutated and I’m generally just pulling diagnostic data off of. Often I’m ssh’d in to a hub machine and jumping in to edge devices, so I couldn’t run ssh kitten if I wanted to. I think I’m probably an edge case, but it is very frustrating.
I’ve been really happy with Kitty.
I have been using https://apps.kde.org/yakuake/ for years. Having the command line available with a simple key combo while not cluttering up any task manager is great.
Me too - I’ll use Konsole if I need to have the results up all the time, but Yakuake is my main terminal.
I’ve been using Terminator for years primarily because it’s portable. It predates a lot of the portable terminals in vogue right now. I haven’t really noticed a difference in using any of the newer ones so I haven’t switched. There’s some endowment effect there and sunk cost dotfiles.
If there’s a good comparison someone knows about that I should scope to understand what I’m missing I’m always curious!
I also exclusively use terminator, I just wish it had ligatures
konsole is fast and reliableI like it
Kitty if you have a GPU and run programs that have a lot of output (build scripts and emerge). It uses the GPU for better performance.
kitty is great, for me it’s similar to mpv: it does what it’s supposed to do, no fluff. Just straight up performance.
Kitty is great until you SSH into a machine where it’s not installed and try to use tmux or some other commandline apps
@flashgnash @Laser Connecting once with its ssh kitten resolves this by uploading appropriate terminfo files to the user’s directory.
I didn’t realise it was only once you had to use it
@flashgnash Yep, just once to transfer the terminfo files and resolve this.
The SSH kitten is pretty useful though. If you use it in combination with kitty’s --single-instance mode, you can start new kitty windows in the same SSH session without logging in again using its shared connection feature. Hugely convenient for how I work at least.
I have used it for that feature before, is there not a concern around defense in depth there though? If you’ve got a rogue program running could it not then hijack your ssh connection and infect that machine as well?
If it’s a machine you have control over you can install the terminfo. Or setting the TERM variable to something like xterm-256color when connecting, that usually works, though I haven’t tried with tmux.
I usually just change TERM to xterm but I’ve heard that isn’t a good way to do it
Also I’d rather not install stuff on every server I ssh into, I’ve installed it on test servers but wouldn’t want to do it on prod
I’ve never had issues with TERM=xterm
xfce4-terminal. Runs fine without xfce4.
Konsole is excellent. Wezterm is even better, and can pretty much do everything, everywhere.
There’s no need to bother with the others if you like either of these.
urxvt is the only terminal I’ll use. Every time I try something else I come back to it because of some basic thing that’s not right - usually font rendering which urxvt is one of the few that works well with scalable fonts. It’s fast and simple and does everything I need without any bloated stuff I’ll never use.
I’ve used GNOME’s terminal, Konsole, kitty, st, cool-retro-term, Alacritty, foot, and Wezterm.
The things I want from a terminal emulator are:
- Ligatures
- Customisability
- Icon support / good font management
- High-ish performance
Wezterm is afaik the only one with all of those.
Konsole is actually a pretty good terminal emulator, its big downside is that it looks horribly out-of-place in anything other than Plasma. So as long as you stay on Plasma, Konsole is a good choice. If you ever move to a WM or something, I recommend foot or Wezterm.
Alacritty has some degree of customisability, Konsole has more, but either way it’s nothing when compared to Wezterm. It is really fast though!
The thing that skews the duel in favour of Konsole for me is the ligature support. I use neovim for programming and we all know code ligatures are a godsend, so ligature support in the terminal is very much a thing that I want.
since you seem to consider alacritty, which is pretty minimal in features, maybe give foot a shot as well. i find it fits best into tiling wm land (sway, river, etc.) so might not be your cup of tea…
Been using foot for like 5 years now. It just gels so damn well with tiling wms and super fast.
what does it better than any other terminal for twms?
It does pretty much nothing in terms of fancy windowing and layout features. No tab interface, split screens, etc. I let those handled by my TWM and it just starts really fast.
I use i3 and don’t have a mouse. Rn I’m using Alacritty because I want to keep things minimal. Is foot a good fit for my usecase?
not sure for i3, i think foot is wayland-only. but i have the same setup with sway and am very happy